Sunday 21 November 2010

A BIT MORE POTTERY

Good Lord! I've managed to upload all the photos I wanted in one go.

This is an artichoke sculpture I have been working on for ages, couldn't get the colour right. But now it's finished, and looks good and I'm inordinately proud of it, as you can guess by the number of pictures!






It's about the size of... a large artichoke! What's it good for? Not much really. Just an object of beauty.

And here is Ellie showing off the size of our big beach...


She was one year old a couple of weeks ago. Oslo has been gone for a whole year. How time flies... And here is a sun-worshipping dachshund:


Well, we get little enough of it (sun) nowadays.

Nothing else to report really.

Monday 15 November 2010

MORE CATERPILLARS, BERRIES AND GRAFFITTI (and Google being very very annoying...)

Google is being very boring, I wrote this a month ago, but have not been able to publish it because Blogspot, run by Google, has mucked up the method of putting photos in the blog, it's virtually impossible, one can add one photo every few days as far as I can see. I've got fed up with this so I'm publishing without the photo that should go with the last paragraph. So this was written in October...

I've done a bit of gardening, wonders never cease. When going down the path a few days ago, I nearly trod on the subject of the photo below. A very large, firm, fat caterpillar, about 7 to 8cm long, and after a long search on internet I've found that it's an Elephant Hawk Moth.




My pyracantha is in full berry and illuminates my front terrace at the moment. Won't be long before the birds get the berries. Have you noticed what a year this has been for fruit of all kinds, nuts, berries on trees, etc? Is it the hard winter we had? The absence of spring frosts? A wonderful month of June? Or a combination of all these factors? Blackberries were very plentiful, apples and pears too, chestnuts are just falling out of the trees (every other tree in the Finistère is a chestnut tree, I've picked up kilos)...



I went to the beach Friday morning because the time for low tide coincided with the time I had to pick up my vegetable basket. So we went to the big beach at Tréguennec. It wasn't very sunny, in fact it's the first time this year I've felt cold, but it was magnificent all the same, hardly a soul in sight. There is a new graffiti on the first blockhaus on the beach. I'm admire graffiti immensely, their complexity, the talent the artists have for getting an overall view while working fast and very close up. It is amazing that the tide, which covers this blockhaus when it is high, does not wash them off. They manage to last several years or until they are painted over.






I made a terrine a few days ago. I've never done that in my life before. I fried up some onion, minced some pork belly and some bacon and a côte échine, lots of parsley, a bit of garlic, added salt, pepper, fresh thyme, chili, nutmeg and a couple of spoonsful of armagnac. Mixed it all up, put half of it in a terrine dish, the put four rabbit fillets in the middle with some prunes, put the rest on top, with a bayleaf to look pretty. Covered it with tinfoil and put it in the oven in a baking dish of water for an hour and a half. It's very good, I'm quite pleased with myself. A little dry maybe, next time I'll put a bit of liver in with the meat, but the flavour is excellent. The ingredients cost me 8€. And it will provide lunch for days and days.

Photo meant to be here (terrine!)